Will Ellis, Development Manager

A hands on leader of development teams

Years of experience in development and a demonstrated history of leading and managing multiple agile teams across different platforms, tech stacks and products; from conception, through design, architecture, development and into continued delivery and maintenance.

my experience

Development

I love to architect, develop, test and deploy applications. On desktop, mobile or the web with whatever technology is best for the job.

Full Stack .Net & Desktop

Originally working with WinForms for desktop development, over the years this then became WPF development. I work with various patterns and frameworks such as MVVM, Prism, Entity framework, SQLCipher, WCF, SQL Server, Identity server and more.

Desktop development is where I really first got my teeth stuck into development, and it allowed me to become a highly skilled full stack C# .Net developer.

Web Development

In more recent years I have made the move to Angular and ASP.Net Core, learning to love making web apps in Typescript and C#.

I’ve taken my years of desktop experience with me though, using it to apply proper modulisation, unit testing and clean coding standards.

Mobile Development

Ever since I got my first Android phone I have loved playing around with native java Android apps. My job then afforded me the chance to lead a team developing an app professionally. Sticking to good Android dev standards using clean architecture, fragments, retrofit, a DAO library and more I really loved working on that project. Still now I like to dabble in some Android dev every once in a while and keep up to date with the latest news and changes. I’ve yet to make the jump to Kotlin though!

Management

Starting with mentoring juniors I soon realised I have a passion for leading and managing developers and the teams they are in.

Mentoring

After working in an Agile team learning from others and continuing to develop my knowledge in and out of work, I soon found that I had a lot of information and advice I could pass onto others. As I became more senior this led to me mentoring other developers and I have loved it ever since. I find seeing another developer grow and evolve with my guidence is incredibly rewarding, and an added benefit is I often learn just as much myself whilst helping them with issues and questions.

Its a great way to keep on learning with others.

Leading

I’m a certified scrummaster and enjoy leading teams in the scrum process, but as well as this I love to get my teeth stuck into projects and lead teams technically with archiectural and coding decisions. As well as this helping organise a project from conception through to continous delivery is a great experience.

Even when I’m not coding full time on a team that I’m leading I ensure I have a full technical understanding of what is happening and where we need to get to, I find that this is key when leading a smart & knowledgable development team.

Managing

As well as getting hands on with the code and leading dev teams, I really enjoy the management side of things too.

Hiring, training and managing technical staff is just another type of development to me, ensuring the right people are doing the right job, with the right resources; and making it visible how great the department & teams are doing. Its great to manage a team of passionate people.

Want to see some examples of what I do?

I DEVELOP DESKTOP, Mobile AND WEB APPLICATIONS

Work Examples

Full Stack Desktop & Mobile Work

Dictation and Task management software

For a number of years I have developed WPF desktop applications, native mobile apps and the services, back end components and database models related to these. The work within this product range is extensive and many teams have been involved, a number of which I have led technically and managerially.

Website & Web App Development

Personal Projects and Websites

Ever since I was in school I’ve made different websites, but now days my web interests are more focused on web apps using Angular for the front end. I do this professionally as well as in my own time.

I’ve written & deployed personal projects in Azure or Firebase, using ASP.Net Core or Node.JS, REST or GraphQL, SQL or Mongo and so on. Whilst learning with theses technologies I have learnt various DevOps processes using Azure DevOps, GitHub, Travis CI and more. As you can tell I like to try and keep myself aprised of different technologies available, to allow me to make better technical decisions.

About Me

Hello! I’m Will. I love to develop software.

Quickly learning any technology I can find, I have always continued to rapidly expand my development, leadership and management skills.

Prodominately from a Microsoft full stack environment I am skilled in C#, .Net, WPF, WCF, SQL and more. But I also work with Angular, NodeJS, Java, Android and all sorts of other web and mobile tech.

I don’t just enjoy coding though, I have a passion for leading teams and individuals working across different tech stacks, truely understanding the complexities of the systems and guiding teams along the right path to getting a great job done.

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